ECSTACY HOTEL TRAILER APPEARS LIKE MAGIC

Fans of Koji Yakusho (DOPPELGANGER, CURE) have a lot to look forward to this year. Not only is Yakusho slated to appear in horror genius, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's, next movie but on January 14 Toho (still Japan's mightiest studio) will release ECSTACY HOTEL. The reason for the excitement? It's written and directed by Koki Mitani who wrote the gob-smackingly good, and totally underrated acting tour de force UNIVERSITY OF LAUGHS which saw Yakusho play a government censor in WWII Japan. Mitani also directed the well-regarded flick about a radio station dealing with a crisis, WELCOME BACK MR. MCDONALD, and he's made a specialty of constructing elaborate houses of cards, then flicking a corner and watching them collapse.

That said, ECSTACY HOTEL, promises beautiful chaos with its minute-by-minute depiction of multiple overlapping characters in a swank hotel trying to do damage control on their lives in the two hours before midnight on New Year's Eve. Yakusho plays the hotel's general manager and you can take a look at a trailer here in Windows Media Player. Check out that trailer and you'll know why my brain quivers with excitement over this movie. It may not be for all tastes, but I'm a sucker for a movie that sets up escalating chaos and then throws in...a duck on the rampage. Does the art of cinema get any more perfect than that?